IT Milk: entry

I’m still continuing my website work with Fellins Jewelers in Hazleton, PA with a different project. We are taking a different course because Logical Solutions, the company that developed the e-commerce application for Fellins.com, is not letting us modify their ASP scripts for SEO purposes because it’s not included in the license. So, the owner of Fellins is improvising with a different pet project called Ivy Covered Halls using ProStores.

Since jewelry is such an amazingly competitive market (we were paying over $1.00 per click for some of the Google Adwords phrases), Fellins wants to explore some niche markets. I recommend other businesses who are interested in the jewelry marketplace (or any market, for that matter) to try to capture niches. It’s better to at least attempt to innovate rather than to add to the saturation.

As you might guess from the name, Ivy Covered Halls specializes in personalized college gifts, offering items such as desk boxes (I didn’t know what the hell these were either), paperweights, frames, clocks and mirrors. Their catalog isn’t too extensive at the moment, numbering at only 12 items. But I think Fellins will go on to add a greater variety to each category and extend its inventory to pens, polo shirts, and anything else that can be personalized.

The interesting part about this project is that Fellins Jewelers chose to build their new e-commerce site with ProStores, an eBay company. The only way ProStores is associated with eBay (as far as I’m concerned) is that it allows easy integration from the e-commerce site to eBay listings, which could be convenient because of a centralized inventory database. Anyway, you pay a monthly fee to ProStores, ranging from $30 to $250, and you get everything from web hosting, email, templates, and a complete and sophisticated administration backend.

The most fun aspect of working with ProStores is that I am learning a new markup language called SSML, which somehow is an acronym for “ProStores Markup Language.” It’s really simple to work with, actually, because they are just object tags that call in a variety of custom-defined data. Here’s what an example of SSML looks like: